Falconry Displays

Here is a lovely photograph of ‘Bo’ our Indian eagle Owl. She is 23 years old now and little did I imagine as I picked her up as a fluffy owlet in 1988 I would still have her now. They are long lived and barring disasters she should do another 23 years.

I always say to people that owls are not really falconry birds – there is no history of their usage for this purpose – but people hardly hear my words as they are transfixed by her beauty and character. Owls are rather cat like in nature – difficult to train and easy to lose particularly doing falconry displays or should I say birds of  flying displays away from home. They have a multitude of senses and are easily distracted and naturally suspicious of all situations – this of course is survival!

Talking about survival perhaps falconers know better than anybody the gigantic effort it takes for a bird of prey to survive its first year  particularly in the winter with short cold days and prey becoming increasingly elusive. Falconers know from their own efforts how difficult it is to enter a young hawk at quarry and how demoralised the bird gets if it keeps missing – with their wild cousins this demoralisation means death and hence a depressingly short life span for many wild raptors. This darwinian stuggle for survival means stable populations for both predator and prey. For the falconer its case of subsidising his charge in its effort to hunt successfully and of course what you see in a falconry display is all those techniques employed in building confidence and style in a hawk or falcon.

When I was growing up these stable population dynamics of wild raptors  did not exist and one rarely saw a sparrowhawk and never  a peregrine. DDT and other pesticides used on crops affected the breeding success of these bird catching species.  This is well documented but  after a ban in the use of these chemicals peregrines numbers in the early 1980’s began to recover and now thirty years on recovery is complete and in fact is beyond complete as peregrines looking for new homes found in our towns and cities exactly what they were looking forward  – sea scapes in our cities with  artificial cliffs in the form of high rise buildings  providing  nesting sites with plenty of town pigeons feeding below amidst a sea of people – and of course a more than welcoming public who were delighted to see them. I where appropriate always try and include this success story in my commentary and I believe the educational aspects of falconry displays has lead to an increased awareness of birds of prey.

Even today for us ‘old timers’ seeing a peregrine is special and will always remain so.

Everyday I walk round our local fields with the dog – we live in a semi rural environment and to escape for a hour each day is wonderful and of course one is aware of the annual cycle of the seasons. The other day I found what I thought was a peregrine kill – a pigeon with its wings left on but the rest of the body neatly eaten away and plucked feathers all around. It was a feral pigeon one of a number who had been gathering on the field to feed on what the combine had  left behind. I checked the kill site the following day and all eveidence had gone apart from a few scattered feathers  – I suspected a fox had taken what was left particularly as there was some strategically placed feaces left on a small mound nearby.

Two days later I was out again and as I walked around the side of the field something caught my eye – this was the falconer in me – it was a peregrine  out on open ground feeding on a kill. I froze  – but despite my best efforts of concealment the peregrine gazed at me and in a moment  was airborne carrying the carcase with it.

Often a raptor will drop its kill if disturbed but not this one – maybe it was a hungry young falcon. It gained altitude and flew away towards and over a high hedge to I assume the fields beyond – it disappeared and then reappeared as if in a quandry as to what to do next. I was rather hopeful it would wheel round and land back in the field – it clearly thought about it but settled on gaining height and heading towards a pylon where it appeared to land. I bothered it no more and continued my walk.

I felt elated and privileged to have encountered the scene something that I had longed  for for so many years. I felt like J A Baker but this time I was not reading about it in his book  ‘The Peregrine’  but seeing it for myself in real life.